Just depends how quiet you want it I suppose. Compared to a video card fan fired up during gaming it's probably pretty quiet? I've been pretty happy with the geilds... It sits on the desk less than 2 feet from my head.

Did you say you are using a fan controller or not?

When it goes under load, you can here the fan ramp up lol. Right now everything is connected to fan controller (NZXT Sentry II, its crap but it works)

Right now the PSU doesn't look so good, after 2 years of ownership it has leaky caps already, but I really can't expect much from a OCZ PSU. I need to be PSU shopping soon, but I'll do it when it actually poops out.

Oh dude... don't let that thing pop lol. It can take the whole damn computer down with it. I witnessed that at a lan once years ago and it wasn't pretty. Fried the entire rig.

Everyone was too drunk to capture the magic blue smoke before it vanished...

Ok... I just looked up that fan controller and your right. It's junk. 10w per chan is pretty bad. I just bought a new fan controller but here's what I'm gonna do for ya if you're interested. My current fan controller; while not pretty, is 30w per chan and will easily run 8 fans off it with y adapters.

If you like I can mail it too you free of charge and you can play around and see if it helps with the fan noise. It doesn't have all the fancy bells and whistles but it works. Basically use it as a test subject and see if the Sentry is causing any problems. After that you can do with it as you please.

I think first thing is that you need to figure out what exactly your definition of "silent" is. You need to be reasonable about it too.

The second thing you need to decide is the temperatures you are willing to put up with.

Once you have that sorted out, you need to figure out which fans / parts are making what sort of noise. For example, I found that the stock Fractal 140mm fans in the R4 doesn't like to be horizontal blowing up. They develop a vibration which causes noise. Horizontal blowing down is fine, vertical is fine.

As an example, I have a 2500k at 4.3 (1.3v) using a D14. Other relevant hardware include a 6950 with a Arctic Cooling heatsink and 3x Silenx 92mm fans, PSU has a GT 1850 rpm. I put a Silverstone 140mm on the bottom to feed air to the GPU fans. The intake fans, D14 fans, exhaust fan are all on the R4's built-in controller usually at 7v. GPU fans are hardwired for 7v. I'm pretty happy with the noise levels since I don't hear the fans at all when there are sounds from games / videos.

I've got my overclocked 2600k (4.8ghz) and GTX 590 on a 240mm rad with a 120mm rad between the cpu and gpu. 3 120mm fans @ 1500rpm in my entire system. Keeps it cool no problem CPU and GPU never get over 50c. Ran 2 570's prior to that and a i7920 and 2 gtx 280's before that, those were heat makers.